Four Massive Serial ATA Hard Drives

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A Dollar a Gigabyte

A long time ago (longer than we care to admit) we upgraded an original Compaq Portable. You may remember the early Compaq, replete with 9-inch, green CRT, a sewing machine-sized case and two 360KB, 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. Two floppy drives just didn’t cut it, so we added a 10MB (that’s megabyte) hard drive, which set us back a cool $600. That’s $60 per megabyte. A gigabyte would have cost $60,000. The cabling and connection for the 10MB drive was a pain too, requiring an 8-bit, non plug-and-play ISA card and a custom driver. That 5.25-inch, 10MB drive seemed blazingly fast, at its rotation speed of 3,600RPM.

Flash forward to the present. Serial ATA drives that support eighty gigabytes per platter are on the scene. The 3.5-inch drives we look at here all rotate at c7,200RPM. Better yet, you can find them at prices just north of $250  approaching a dollar a gigabyte. That’s 1/60,000 the cost of hard drive space back in the early eighties.

Of course, parallel ATA drives that support 80GB per platter have been out for a few months now, and they’re still slightly cheaper than their Serial ATA brethren. For example, the Western Digital WD2500 SATA drive costs around $277 (best price on PriceGrabber), while the parallel ATA version comes in at $237. As SATA becomes more commonplace, the price differentials will decrease and even swing the other way. But like all technology shifts, this will take time.

However, not all SATA drives are necessarily more expensive. The dual-platter Seagate drive we used in this roundup is roughly the same price in both parallel and SATA versions (best PriceGrabber prices were $137).

SATA has some additional benefits, though, that make it attractive even today:

Parallel ATA drives are limited to a maximum burst speed of 100MB/sec (133MB/sec in the case of Maxtor ATA133 drives running on an ATA133 interface). The current SATA standard has a theoretical maximum of 150MB.sec.

Configuration is easier. Gone is the master/slave jumper. Each SATA drive uses a point-to-point connection. Serial ATA cables are much thinner, and the connectors are more compact. No more daisy-chaining bulky ribbon cables.

The compact connector and cabling allow for better airflow, particularly inside small form factor PCs. While today’s systems still require support for parallel ATA solutions, eventually the old IDE connector will vanish, and allow for more compact motherboards and free up valuable PCB real estate.

We’ve been anticipating the Shift to Serial ATA since last year. So we were keen on reviewing serial ATA drives now that they’re commonplace. Then we discovered something interesting.

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